We'll Always Have Stockholm

The sheriff is stuck, bleeding in a basement, almost certainly dying. That’s the really big challenge I’m facing, strangely enough. When I think about all the other characters and situations, I don’t get nearly the same pit-of-the-stomach feeling as I do thinking about the sheriff. Will he? Won’t he?

           He’s been fading for almost six months, I think.

           It’s hard to tell time here; I try not to dwell on it too much; if I’m not already crazy, that’ll get me there in a hurry. It’s like my brain is running a continuous circuit on a giant hamster wheel, and somewhere along in that wheel there’s a big hole to fall in every revolution or so. When’s the last time you saw Sam? When’s the last time you saw Addie? Are they stuck, waiting along with the rest of the universe for you to break the cycle…or have they moved on without you, convinced that you just disappeared into the ether forever?

           Like every stock character in every similarly themed cautionary tale, I daily mourn the consequences of my own wish fulfillment. Daily, ha. Days are a thing of the past, present, and future – and I’m in none of those. 

*

           I discovered this strange gift about fifty thousand words into my third shitty novel. You know the type – another road sign along the way toward that first one million words you’re supposed to throw out before getting taken seriously as a writer? Feverishly working in dribs and drabs (while extolling to yourself and anyone who’ll listen the virtues of sitting down and writing a thousand words a day, every day) against not one, but two, horrific deadlines: the moment you’ll give up on the project because you got bored or lost your confidence in it or got stuck…and, of course, the moment when entropy finally finishes catching up to the industry you’ve loved since you were ten, and AI stands triumphantly holding its severed head aloft. 

           This time, things were different. The world around me began to disappear, and the story (born, as many of them have been, of a nightmare) began to take over my reality. The self-loathing narcissism was so strong within me that it took long minutes for me to realize that this wasn’t some moment of writer’s nirvana – I had an actual bizarre phenomenon on my hands.

           Or, more properly, underneath them. 

           Everything that I was putting down on the page – every bit of stage direction, dialogue, unnecessary philosophical fluffy narration (I told you it was shitty) …all of it was coming true before my eyes. I had been transported – there is no other way to say this – by magic into the world of my unfolding book.

           Jack, the wide-eyed and curious teenager with a character arc I flattered myself I could build competently, had survived the plane crash, stumbling the rest of the way down a hill into a secluded, walled community of people who were a little more than just strange. He, like the reader, didn’t have to wonder why for long: this was a religious cult, and Jack had come along right as it was about to spiral out of control and into blood-soaked oblivion. 

           There was Melody, the obligatory teen love interest – the girl whose parents had died mysteriously when she was very young, and who had in essence been adopted by the cult and had been raised in it. Her siren song to Jack was her compassion and a kind of young, feral hormonal compatibility – such was my ode to youthful love as best I could render it thus far. 

           There were the townspeople – mostly rubes with useful talents, as I couldn’t figure out how else to write them…who else was dumb enough in their middle age to fall for the kind of bullshit the Reverend Charles Green had been peddling to them for years?

           And that brings us to the Reverend Himself – the latter word capitalized because, naturally, He was a deity. Charles Green. You know, no offense to anyone with that name, but I picked it on the fly, and it just doesn’t seem like cult leader material. I suppose at some point, once I come up with something better, I’ll need to do a Find and Replace.

           But for now, there’s a much bigger problem. 

           When I first looked around me – really looked around me – and realized that my little home office was gone (as were Sam and Addie and everyone and everything else in my world), replaced entirely by the world of the novel (I’m almost embarrassed at the title now…We’ll Always Have Stockholm), I pulled away from the only things left of my world – my laptop and desk – and simply walked around. I spent hours, I suppose, but it was impossible to tell for sure because everything in this world was frozen in place. It was waiting, I later realized, for its creator to continue the story. And, after a panic attack that verged on a complete mental breakdown at witnessing all of existence defy its own set of laws, eventually, I got back to work.

           What else was there to do, really? I reasoned that the only way to get back to my wife and daughter – not to mention the rest of the (real?) world, was to finish the story. Maybe that would break the spell, or maybe it would kill me. Who knew?

           What I did know, moments after I began typing again, was that at least this was a way to get things moving. As I wrote, the story moved forward. The Reverend Charles Green visited the well-guarded barn where the cult had been building their spaceship in secret for years now. Melody’s long and repressed history of sexual abuse at the hands of the cult elders (also practically obligatory in a story like this) began to come out in conversations with Jack, who was himself recovering astonishingly well for a young man who’d only recently lived through a plane crash. 

           And, of course, nosy hero Sheriff Jim Caruthers had come back on the scene, after having a series of hunches about how the Thistle Creek Community – that isolated group of weirdos out in the sticks – had been located awfully close to the site of the recent plane crash. God, I had wanted to write that character so badly – I’m a sucker for the hero’s journey, and while I would never in a million years have typed it out…you could practically feel the squareness of that man’s jaw and the barrel shape of his chest. 

           And it was right about the time when he got shot in that basement while calling backup and trying to rescue Melody…

           Right around the time that Jack’s divorced parents were making rapid progress toward meeting up in Georgia to go looking for the one thing that still tied them together forever…

           Just when Bill – one of the hapless sheep in the cult, who had designed and built most of the spaceship – was going through launch preparations that had been moved up all of a sudden (because Dear Leader had told him they were going to have to get out tonight)…

           As Charles Green and Jack (Herman, okay? Turns out Charles Green wasn’t the worst name I picked in this story; my apologies to all the Jack Hermans out there) were squaring off in the ultimate good versus evil moment…

           Right when the bullets were about to start firing in all directions, and the fires were about to get set, and the doomed spaceship was about to rise, Phoenix-like, from the ground into the night sky…

           I got writer’s block.

*

           And…here I am. I’m stuck in a frozen world of three-quarters-unfolded melodrama, and I don’t know where to go from here. I know that the spaceship blows up (although I also know that they never recover any of the wreckage or bodies…mysterious, hmm?). I’m sure Green gets it in the end, before the spaceship thing. I mean, he’s got to, right? Surely Jack and Melody live, although even I have enough presence of mind as a storyteller to not cut to some epilogue where they’re married or something – no, this story requires some kind of Bogie walking off on the tarmac and talking about a beautiful friendship ending. 

           But what about the sheriff? 

           It’s weird to think it, but somewhere deep in my bones I know that everything rests on whether that guy lives or dies. I’ve wandered through this little world of mine for so long now – like I said, time doesn’t seem to mean anything here – but I don’t feel any closer to figuring it out. Once, during my captivity, I had the idea that maybe I could just write an ending and break the spell. Try this out for size:

           It was at that moment that there was a sound above – the somnolent buzz of a high-altitude aircraft flying overhead. Everyone in the small community looked up at the same moment, just in time to see the last thing they would ever see. A fraction of a moment later, they erupted in nuclear fire as Thistle Creek – and everything in the surrounding fifty-mile area – was instantly vaporized. The End.

           Guess what? No dice. None of that even rendered in my imaginary world, let alone let me out of it. I was, and still am, stuck here. I guess I’m a prisoner until I figure out – and write – the correct ending, whatever that might be. No working it out in rewrites, no cheating. Just me living in my little world, working it out until I get it right. At least…I hope that’ll end it. And I hope that time is frozen everywhere.

           I kind of desperately hope that. Because recently (whatever that means) I was walking through one of the houses in Thistle Creek, and I passed by a mirror. When I saw my own face, I made a terrifying discovery. My hair has begun to turn gray at the temples and in my beard…kind of a lot. And I’m only 27. 

           I think…

-End-